Dexin Chen

The accurate identification of weeds in peanut fields can significantly reduce the use of herbicides in the weed control process. To address the identification difficulties caused by the cross-growth of peanuts and weeds and by the variety of weed species, this paper proposes a weed identification model named EM-YOLOv4-Tiny incorporating multiscale detection and attention mechanisms based on YOLOv4-Tiny. Firstly, an Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) module is added to the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) of YOLOv4-Tiny to improve the recognition of small target weeds by using the detailed information of shallow features. Secondly, the soft Non-Maximum Suppression (soft-NMS) is used in the output prediction layer to filter the best prediction frames to avoid the problem of missed weed detection caused by overlapping anchor frames. Finally, the Complete Intersection over Union (CIoU) loss is used to replace the original Intersection over Union (IoU) loss so that the model can reach the convergence state faster. The experimental results show that the EM-YOLOv4-Tiny network is 28.7 M in size and takes 10.4 ms to detect a single image, which meets the requirement of real-time weed detection. Meanwhile, the mAP on the test dataset reached 94.54%, which is 6.83%, 4.78%, 6.76%, 4.84%, and 9.64% higher compared with YOLOv4-Tiny, YOLOv4, YOLOv5s, Swin-Transformer, and Faster-RCNN, respectively. The method has much reference value for solving the problem of fast and accurate weed identification in peanut fields.